Student tracking, secret scores: How college admissions offices rank prospects before they apply
In an article published by the Washington Post, Douglas MacMillan and Nick Anderson discuss how web activity and cookies are becoming a different form of demonstrated interest. “Student tracking, secret scores: How college admissions offices rank prospects before they apply” reveals that colleges are starting to collect data not only through applications, but also through students’ interactions with the school’s website. Through a single cookie, the university could collect a student’s name, contact information, and how many pages the student viewed on the website along with time spent on each one. College admissions consulting companies can present to an admissions officer how likely, based on web activity, a student is to accept an admissions officer from the university.
This relates to the internet becoming a heightened resource used to track networks, but it also showcases how following hyperlinks within a website can be used as a signal of interest. The amount of hyperlinks you follow and your search behavior can actually be qualitized into an “affinity index” telling a university how interested you are in attending. In theory this isn’t too harmful because it’s giving universities heightened interest in students interested in them.
However, this creates major issues when it comes to lower socioeconomic status students. Especially at large state schools, the appeal to actually filter students based on applicants who won’t need much financial aid is extremely high. This combined with a formula that gives weight based on factors like major, in-state/out of state status, distance from campus, income level, and consuming purchasing behavior, assigns students a score that can tell the university who will need the least amount of financial aid, and is most likely to donate back to the university after graduation. This has major implications for how equality within the college admissions process could be affected, giving further advantages to those with better access to technology and those with higher socioeconomic statuses.